Month: October 2009

IPMI is a standardized message-based hardware management interface that provides a foundation for full monitoring of system health and management of the system, both locally and remotely in a secure manner.
The hardware chip that implements the core of IPMI is known as the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), or Management Controller (MC).
And there are many companies that support IPMI. Dell, HP, Intel Corporation and NEC Corporation …

In our case and In practice, we will use the hp-OpenIPMI and hpasm drivers with RHEL/CentOS 5,
you must install the “kernel-devel” package and make sure its version matches the “kernel”
package you’re currently using. The “kernel-devel” package contains the necessary .config file for building kernel modules
(which is what the hp-OpenIPMI package wants to do).$ sudo yum install kernel-devel

To apply the patch to the ipmi file, change to the directory where the file is located:$ cd /etc/init.d
$ sudo patch -p1 -i ~/ipmi.patch
Launch the IPMI service, which will load the kernel modules for you$ sudo /etc/init.d/ipmi start

Start the hpasm agents using the command$ sudo /etc/init.d/hpasm start

There are two ways to configure the BMC. You can configure it through the boot-time menu (Ctrl-E), where you can set the management password and IP address information. Or, you can configure it with ipmitool from the OS. We will configure it from OS so create a custom ipmi_lan.conf with this content$ cat /etc/ipmi_lan.conf
addr 0.0.0.0
priv_limit admin
allowed_auths_callback md5
allowed_auths_user md5
allowed_auths_operator md5
allowed_auths_admin md5
user 2 true “username” “password” admin 1 md5

Start the ipmi daemon that will listen in all interfaces and will bind the 623 port by default.$ sudo ipmilan -c /etc/ipmi_lan.conf

Note the ‘-H’ option indicates the remote machine, ‘-U’ option parameter is the ‘userid’ name. The ‘-a’ option indicates to prompt for password.
This IPMItool command ‘chassis command’ result some information and the status of the machine’s system
Note that you cannot only get the status of the machine, you can also power it on and off, reset, adjust fan speeds etc …